Cocoon is hiring · internship
AI Engineering Intern
Internship · 6 months
Hybrid · Colombo
LKR 25,000 / month
Ship things people actually use.
We build and give away AI tools — 26 of them so far. You will add to that, and watch strangers use what you made.
Apply now →
Takes about five minutes · CV goes straight to Ammar
What this internship actually is
Cocoon builds its own tools and leaves them switched on for free — workflow mappers, scam simulators, hand-tracking experiments, a browser-trained language model. They are on the public site, and people use them daily.
You will work on those. Not a sandbox project that gets archived when your internship ends — code that deploys, gets used, and occasionally breaks in ways you will have to fix.
What you'll be doing
- Build features on the free tools. Front end, AI calls, the plumbing behind them. Small pieces, shipped often.
- Work with real AI APIs. Prompting, structured outputs, fallbacks, cost and latency — the parts tutorials skip.
- Fix what breaks. Real users find real bugs. Debugging something live is a different skill from writing something new.
- Make things fast and accessible. These tools run on classroom projectors and mid-range phones, not your laptop.
- Prototype quickly. Some ideas get built in a day to find out whether they are any good.
- Write down how it works, so the next person can pick it up.
What you'll leave with
Deployed work with a public URL you can send anyone — worth more in an interview than any certificate, because they can click it.
And real experience of AI in production: what it costs, how it fails, and how to build so a bad model day is not an outage.
Who this is for
- You have built something. A site, a bot, a game, a script that solved your own problem. Show it — finished beats impressive.
- Comfortable with JavaScript or willing to get comfortable quickly. Most of what we run is plain JS, HTML and Cloudflare Workers.
- You have used AI APIs or at least pushed past the chat window into something programmatic.
- Undergraduate, fresh graduate, or self-taught. No degree requirement — the work you can point at matters more.
- Based in or near Colombo for hybrid working.
Worth knowing before you apply
Your code goes live
That is the appeal and the pressure. Nothing here sits in a branch nobody merges — but it does mean review, care, and occasionally fixing something on a Friday.
It is not a research role
You will not be training models. You will be building things on top of them, well. If you want a research lab, this is the wrong internship and we would rather you knew now.
Small team, wide surface
Some weeks are front end, some are AI plumbing, some are working out why a page is slow on a projector. You will not specialise, and that is the point.
Six months, then an honest conversation
If it works both ways we talk about what comes next. No promises made on day one that we cannot keep.
How hiring works
- Apply below — your CV and a few honest lines. A person reads every one.
- You hear back either way, usually within two weeks.
- A short conversation — half an hour about what you have made and what you want to learn.
- A small paid task — a small feature or fix on one of the live tools. We pay for your time even at this stage.
Apply for this role